Read Horse of a Different Color for Free Online

commencin’ at one o’clock would allow him enough loading time, and I recall you sayin’ that one o’clock would be just fine, but if we agreed on that as a fixed time I sure forgot about it. Oh well, I guess it won’t make much odds one way or another. I see you’ve got the steers all sorted and penned accordin’ to sizes, so we’ll have plenty of time anyways. It was the sortin’ that I was mostly concerned about.”
    Bob was on a spot where he couldn’t holler without practically admitting his guilt. I knew he was fuming inside, but he tried to act jovial. “That’s all right,” he said. “I and the boys have got everything lined out so’s’t you won’t have to lose a minute nowheres. I’ve got the scales all balanced up for you, and the boys’ll put the cattle acrost the platform as fast as you can set weights on the beam.”
    The condition of the pens left little doubt as to the amount of water Bob had managed to get into those steers—or that it was draining away rapidly. Waterlogged cattle won’t eat or drink again for several hours, so Bob’s only hope for any success in his trick was to get his steers weighed as quickly as possible, but George wouldn’t hurry. After he’d spent five or six minutes sliding the counterpoise back and forth along the scale beam, Bob called out, “Anything wrong, George?”
    “Wouldn’t say so,” George answered. “Just a mite sluggish and bound up. Nothin’ more than a man might expect if they’re rusted. Stompin’ on the corners ought to loosen ’em up.”
    For fully half an hour George paid no attention to a few pieces of lumber, half buried in hay chaff, that lay in the ten-inch space between the beam housing and the fence at the front of the scale platform. Then he sang out, “By gosh, I’ll bet that’s where the boar got into the cabbage patch. Like as not there’s a rotten plank busted down onto the beam rod.” He bent over and tossed out a ten-foot 2 by 6, along with a half a dozen shorter pieces of old lumber. “That’s it, sure enough,” he said, wrenched away a sagging plank, and slid the 2 by 6 back to bridge the hole. His face was expressionless, though I was sure he noticed what I did—the 2 by 6 had been so placed that, by stepping on it, the gate tender could add his own weight to that of each batch of cattle put over the scales.
    In a last desperate effort to get a few hundred pounds of water weighed with his cattle, Bob kept his men at a trot as they drove steers on and off the scales. It was half past three when the first ten were driven on, and four twenty when the last ten were driven off. As George weighed each batch he had Bob and me check the scales, the figure he entered on the tally sheet, and the addition to the previous total. He wrote his name below the last figure brought down, passed the pencil to Bob, and said, “I want both of you to go over my arithmetic and put your name down if you find I’m right, then there’ll be no room for arguments later on.” As Bob leaned over the tally sheet George looked around at me, and one eyelid drooped for an instant. I had no way of estimating how much water Bob had tried to sell Bones at twelve cents a pound, but his steers would have had to weigh an additional thirteen tons to bring the hundred dollars apiece that he’d bragged they would.
    Bob helped with the loading, but didn’t go along when George and I took the tally sheets to the bank. Bones made no comment on the weight, but told me to get the cattle auctioned early Monday morning, and to wire him immediately the amount he could draft against the commission agent.
    Cattle usually lost 7 to 10 per cent in weight during shipment from western Kansas. But Bob’s steers had dried out so thoroughly before George weighed them that the shipping shrinkage was slight, and on Monday morning beef cattle at the Kansas City auctions sold for the highest prices since the war. The steers I brought in did well enough that Bones